Streaming media on the rise: Booxmedia raises €450,000

As the trend goes, TV is leaving the clumsy cable pipes to surf the world wide web, as the phrase goes. Finland's Booxmedia is successfully riding that wave, building whitelabel technology for broadcasters, operators, and copyright owners to put up a full-featured streaming TV service in weeks, and without hardware investments. Today they announce they've raised €450,000 from existing shareholders, including Kaj Hagros, DNA, and Alma Media, and announces Tekes, the Finnish funding agency, has invited Booxmedia to the second stage of its "Young Innovative Growth Companies" program.

With more and more TV content online, Booxmedia will use the funding to stay in front of the trends they're seeing, such as the switch to premium content they're seeing from content rights holders. “We are convinced that within the next three years, the IPTV and OTT services have taken giant leaps from today. We in Booxmedia are in the forefront of this development," says Booxmedia Kaj Hagros, Executive Chairman of Booxmedia.

Booxmedia's services work on most platforms you can imagine, including iOS, Android, or Windows Phone on the mobile side. For home, Booxmedia is plugged into smart-TVs and game counsels as downloadable apps, and through web browsers on the computer. More recently on the product side, CEO Jukka Sintonen tells us they're working on Chromecast support, and have been doing a lot of work on the recommendations and advertising solutions.

Sintonen tells us that 50% of their revenue is coming from B2B sales outside Finland. The company has grown rapidly since we last covered them. From a few people sitting in a small office on Helsinki's Fredrikinkatu, the company now has approximately 30 employees, including its own development and testing team in Asia.

In Finland, Booxmedia runs an end-to-end cloud TV service for consumers with about 20,000 active users, which could be seen as more of a direct-to-consumer solution like Stockholm-based Magine. That being said, the company seems keen on focusing on selling their solution B2B, and seems to us BooxTV for testing products on consumers. The service provides everything from network recording, live TV, premium content, and even karaoke.